Message from the President

Welcome to the Internet home of the Society of Composers, Incorporated, one of the premiere professional service organizations for composers in America.

SCI was founded in 1966 as the American Society of University Composers to further the cause of contemporary American music by providing opportunities for performing, recording, and publishing members' works. The name ASUC was later changed to SCI to reflect the demography of our organization, which today comprises around 1,200 members, in- and out of academe.

Some of the measure of SCI's success in promoting contemporary American music can be seen in the more-than 5,000 performances of new works SCI has sponsored at its annual national, regional, and student conferences. The presentation of conferences--music festivals that showcase the works of SCI composers--is one of the primary missions of SCI, and distinguishes us from other service organizations for composers.

Our Conferences are far from staid affairs, with guest composers like (the late) Frank Zappa and Michael Daugherty, evenings of symphonic, choral, wind-symphony, electroacoustic, and chamber music as well as multimedia. SCI-members' music speaks in a broad range of musical styles and aesthetics.

In addition to conference presentations, our organization has many other facets:

Our CD-recording series is flourishing, with seventeen volumes currently available from Capstone records and catalogued on this website. We recently began another CD project, our Performers Series, each volume of which showcases an up-and-coming instrumentalist or ensemble performing SCI-member works recorded in close consultation with the composers.

We offer personal, updatable web pages at our site http://societyofcomposers.org, on which SCI members can post .mp3s and .pdfs of their compositions. Our streaming-media server, COMPOSERVER, provides internet streaming-audio publishing for recordings of members' works.

Our annual Student Commission Competition, which we sponsor with the generous assistance of ASCAP, has helped and encouraged the careers of many young composers. Indeed, the student-membership and student-chapter component in SCI is one of the strongest in our organization. Our yearly National Student Conference is a major festival of works by young composers, and is "student" in name only.

Our 29-volume Journal of Music Scores, published by European American is a wonderfully broad-spectrum archive of contemporary American music.

For a complete description of SCI's activities, I invite you to browse this website.

Thanks for your interest in SCI. Please feel free to contact me, or any of our other officers, if you need more information about our organization.